Ideally I would like to avoid fighting as much as possible because it seems like it would be a steep learning curve. Would it be possible for a non-violent scholar to travel the world collecting books? Is there a way to get in to towers without fighting? I have never created a character before and some tips on what attributes I should focus on would be much appreciated.
I know there are books in towers but I have no idea how to search for other libraries in this latest version. I have poked around in the PerfectWorld legends viewer but I haven't been able to find any mention of libraries. Any thoughts on how to find libraries?
I'm trying to figure out the parts about the libraries myself, but I do have a few general adventure mode comments: First, Last night, before I lost my progress to the tavern crash, (don't sleep in tavern rooms in this version,) I found four books in the catacombs beneath the castle of my local town. These books were fairly dull tomes about the history of the surrounding hamlets, but it's the largest haul of books that I've found so far.
This brings me to my second point: Books are probably going to be in dangerous places, and you're going to have to travel a lot through open country, so even if you don't want to make your character into a blood-soaked death machine, I would still put in some time doing a pretty standard adventure mode training program. With just a little bit of grinding, you can massively increase your survivability and your character attributes, so at the very least you can go out on a couple of adventures worthy of song to get it out of your scholar's system. Some general tips:
- Stat-wise, you probably want to put points in Strength, Agility, and Willpower. (Willpower keeps you from passing out due to pain. My understanding is that it's less important than it used to be, but passing out in combat is still an insta-death, so...)
- One of the easiest things you can do is train throwing. I usually do this before I do anything else. Walk out of town and throw rocks for half a day, and you can get both thrower and archer up to Legendary. Thrown rocks are almost useless in combat with humanoid enemies in this version, but they will kill small animals in one hit, making it easy to get food out in the wilderness. If you can get some crossbow bolts, though, you can throw them ninja-style in combat, and this can be a good way to get an edge even without training any other skills.
- Get some armor as fast as you can. It can be crappy armor, but try to get full coverage. Lots of random enemies have crappy weapons, and against a silver shortsword even a copper gauntlet can be the difference between a bruise and major nerve damage. I've been having a harder time getting armor in this version vs. previous versions. Previously I'd find pieces in hamlet mansions or the catacombs under towns, but Toady seems to have cleaned those up a bit. Other sources are bandits, (rare) armor stores, and, of course, companions who charge into battle unwisely.
- Once you have full armor coverage, wrestle small animals. Good candidates are rabbits, ducks, and (my favorite) horseshoe crabs. Put away your weapon, sneak up on it, and use the wrestling menu to grab it with one hand/arm. Then use another appendage to grab and release the animal repeatedly, while holding on with the first appendage (so that the critter can't get away.) This will train wrestling and fighting. If you like on the ground (so that you can't dodge,) and let the animal hit you while you do this, you'll train armor user, and the animal can't actually hurt you through your armor. (Mostly. Sometimes, you'll get a broken ear or lose a tooth.) If you hold a shield while doing this, you can train shield user, and if you do this while standing you can train dodge as well. Just be sure to train armor user and shield user before dodge, because if dodge gets too high, you'll almost never get hit, even when lying down, meaning that armor user won't go up anymore. And, you can just release your horseshoe crab back onto the beach when you're done!
- Once you've completed the previous step, weapon skills are pretty easy to train by fighting with a goblin/bandit or two, since they'll basically never land a blow on you, and you can keep parrying their attacks to train weapon skills. Be careful, though, because they gain skill from this, so you want to kill them, disable them, or scare them off before they become too powerful.
If you do all of the above, then even if you don't want to wander across the land waging war on your foes, you can still look for books in the forgotten places beneath towns without worrying that the next lone goblin maceman you meet is going to be your doom.
Good luck!